


golden light and black clouds

by lovelylogans



Series: lavender for luck [3]
Category: Sanders Sides (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Practical Magic Fusion, Anxiety, Friday The Thirteenth, M/M, Magic, Superstition
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-27
Updated: 2019-10-27
Packaged: 2021-01-04 13:21:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21198311
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovelylogans/pseuds/lovelylogans
Summary: It should not have been necessarily surprising, that his witch boyfriend was superstitious, but this bordered on the absurd.or: friday the thirteenth is tomorrow, and virgil's trying to prepare. one of his boyfriends, however, is being a bit stubborn about it.





	golden light and black clouds

**Author's Note:**

> _Always keep mint on your windowsill in August, to ensure that buzzing flies will stay outside, where they belong. Don’t think the summer is over, even when roses droop and turn brown and the stars shift position in the sky. Never presume August is a safe or reliable time of the year. It is the season of reversals, when the birds no longer sing in the morning and the evenings are made up of equal parts golden light and black clouds. The rock-solid and the tenuous can easily exchange places until everything you know can be questioned and put into doubt._  
_-practical magic,_ alice hoffman.
> 
> so, this is for the 13 days of halloween prompt over at [@sanderssidescelebrations!](sidescelebrations.tumblr.com/post/187843455281/sanders-sides-spooky-month) today’s prompt is **friday the 13th!** this also ties into my fic, [lavender for luck](https://lovelylogans.tumblr.com/post/177289965691/lavender-for-luck-the-masterpost)—you don’t _necessarily_ need to have read it to understand, but it would probably help!

It should not have been necessarily surprising, that his witch boyfriend was superstitious, but this bordered on the absurd.

“Are you _sure_ you’ve got_—?”_ Virgil asks, poking his head into Logan’s bedroom _again,_ his hair messy and tousled and generally untidy.

Virgil’s looked stressed for the whole of the month—he isn’t particularly prone to smiling, but usually, when he does, it’s genuine and soft and sweet. Since they’d all come back to school, he’s been stressed—shoulders hiked up close to his ears, a tightness around his eyes, the bags under his typical eyeshadow growing deeper and darker, and when he smiles, it’s almost like it’s just for their sake. He’s used to Roman doing something similiar to that. Not Virgil.

It still confounds Logan, that a Friday the 13th could really have Virgil that rattled.

“Yes,” Logan says wearily. “I haven’t moved the mint on the sill and I have the lavender oil in the bathroom.”

“Good,” Virgil says, already distracted, “right, good,” and he closes Logan’s door behind him.

Logan returns to annotating his textbook. He’s only read a page more by the time Virgil sticks his head in again.

“And you—you know a lemonade recipe, right?”

“_Lemonade?”_ Logan repeats skeptically, looking up from the textbook.

Virgil looks abruptly embarrassed, before he scuffs his toe along the carpet and mumbles, “Look, just—if someone _irritates_ you tomorrow, don’t—don’t retaliate too excessively, yeah? Just drink lemonade instead.”

“All right,” Logan says. “Sure. I’ll drink lemonade if I get particularly annoyed with someone.”

He must not sound particularly dedicated to the idea, because Virgil glowers at him a little.

“And you have class at noon, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Cool,” Virgil says, “that’s cool,” and then he shuffles a little further into the room. “Can I take a look at your ceiling fan?”

“My _ceiling fan?”_ Logan repeats.

“I just want to be sure that it works well,” Virgil says. 

“That’s outlined in your family’s mythos?” Logan says. 

“Yeah, actually,” Virgil says, and flicks on the ceiling fan. He watches it circle a few times, eyes narrowed, before he flicks it off again. “Can I stand on your bed?”

Logan considers this, before he says, “As long as your shoes are off.”

Virgil wiggles his socked toes at him in answer (purple with cartoonish black cats on them, undoubtedly a gift from Patton) and clambers onto his bed. 

That’s the point when turning back to his textbook loses any hope, because Virgil hums thoughtfully, and then Logan’s ceiling fan begins to dissemble itself into his hands.

Logan stares, jaw slightly unhinged, as Virgil seems to investigate each piece, before just—_sticking it back on,_ not with any particular sense of _order,_ but it seems that as long as he puts the pieces back and if he _wills_ it to happen then it would just... _happen._

It’s nonsensical. It’s utterly, completely unrealistic.

It’s _magic._

Logan’s known Virgil’s magic for months, of course. But when they first came back to the apartment, Virgil was shy about doing magic in front of them, and then they spent a summer parted, but now, Logan supposes, with all the supposed dangers of a Friday the 13th and _three_ more people to look after than he’s used to...

Virgil sneezes once, flicks a finger dismissively in the air, and Logan watches as the dust seems to disintegrate from _everywhere_ in the room—the fan’s inner machinery, which is what seems to have made him sneeze in the first place, the top of the bookshelf, the inside of grates that he can’t reach with a feather duster—and the air immediately smells cleaner, sweeter, like lavender and honey.

“That’s _remarkable,”_ Logan says, before he can help himself. Really, it’s a wonder he’s managed to keep quiet for so long.

“What, cleaning?” Virgil says, but his pink cheeks give away how flustered he is.

“All of it,” Logan says, and squints up at the fan, as if the magic will dispense itself into formulas that will float in the air until he can solve them and figure it all out. “How do you know how to make it work?”

“Well, I’ve repaired a couple over the years, but it’s mostly,” Virgil says, and makes a vague hand gesture. “Intention, I guess? I mean, I have to know my limits, but. Stuff like this, the magic’s mostly wanting.”

“Limits?” Logan repeats.

“Mostly the cliché stuff,” Virgil says absently. “You know, bringing back the dead, love, that kind of thing. It’s pretty individualized, though—apparently Sally’s kid’s resurrected a few sparrows or something, so she might have a necromancy gift. First in the family, we think, but it’s still pretty early to tell.”

“Is there a particular age at which gifts manifest?” Logan said, debating if he wanted to dig out the notebook he’s started to keep about Fae family traditions.

“Eh, not really?” Virgil said. “Apparently mine started showing around the time I started talking, which makes sense, since mine’s communication-based.”

“With cats.”

“Yeah,” Virgil says. “My—“

He hesitates, clears his throat, and says, quieter, “My dad’s gift didn’t show up until late, I think. He was about eleven or twelve.”

Virgil’s never really mentioned his parents, outside of their deaths.

“What was his?” Logan asks, grateful that, for once, his voice seems to have taken the hint and gentled.

“Prophecy,” Virgil says. “Dreams, mostly, but stuff like tarot and tea leaves.” A pause, and then Virgil shakes himself. “Uncle’s showed up way earlier—he was young, too, he can talk with snakes and he’s got a gift with plants.”

“Even with identical twins, there’s variance,” Logan says. “Interesting.”

He wants to ask more—he always does, whenever Virgil mentions something about magic like it’s a common, well-known fact to everyone and Logan _doesn’t know it—_but he isn’t quite sure how to ask it. He isn’t Patton—he can’t gently approach the subject of Virgil’s _dead parents,_ who have died from the same thing that Virgil fears might take him and Roman and Patton one day. 

So he changes the subject back to the _other_ slightly more pressing worry to Virgil. “Are Friday the thirteenths really so dangerous? I mean, this seems like a lot of—precaution.”

“I mean, they’re,” Virgil says, and hesitates even more, before he says, “They’re, I mean. You’re more prone to bad luck and everything, but it’s—it’s the August ones that are—“ He fumbles the end of his sentence. Logan disregards this.

“_August_ is more dangerous, really?” He says. “I’d have assumed—October. Or a solstice month, at least, you’ve mentioned the importance of those.”

It really didn’t seem to fit—the heat of summer, the sunny, bright days. Roman taking them all swimming in the pool, Patton making homemade popsicles and the way they melted over Logan’s fingers, Virgil blowing a breath across the back of Logan’s neck and it moving his body from overheated and sweaty and uncomfortable to cooler and more comfortable and sated in the space of seconds—none of it seemed particularly _dangerous._

But then—the stress that Virgil’s so clearly been under, since they all moved back to school.

“My parents died in August,” Virgil says, and Logan closes his mouth. Virgil smiles—tight, humorless. Logan hates it. “Well, around this time, anyway. Whenever the curse takes place, it takes into account the—the continuation of the line, or whatever, but most of the time, it’s...”

“In August,” Logan realizes, quiet—from his own research, even months ago, he can remember the number of deaths of the spouses of Fae.

“Right.”

Logan hesitates, before he reaches out and takes Virgil’s hand. He, certainly, isn’t the most _comforting_ boyfriend of the four of them, but he’ll certainly have to try.

“There’s a vending machine in the astronomy building that sells lemonade,” Logan says, as a peace offering. “I can buy one in the morning. Just to be prepared.”

Virgil smiles, and, for the first time since the calendar changed months, there isn’t quite the same tightness around his eyes. Logan leans close, and kisses his cheek, before he digs out the notebook he’s kept for Fae magic, and heads the paper with **FRIDAY THE 13TH.**

“You can tell me the things I should do or avoid,” Logan suggests, clicking a pen. “If you’d like.”

Virgil lets out a slow breath, before he starts to speak, like he’s reciting a poem.

“Make certain never to step on one of the crickets that may have taken refuge in a dark corner of your living room, or your luck will change for the worse. Avoid men who call you Baby, and women who have no friends, and dogs that scratch at their bellies and refuse to lie down at your feet. Crossed knives set out on the dinner table means there’s bound to be a quarrel...”

Logan takes dedicated notes, the whole time. If he’d looked up as he asked his questions of clarification (”this applies to women specifically?”) then he would have seen Virgil smiling softer and fonder, and while he stared at Logan, he wasn’t too anxious at all.


End file.
